Session 6b: Discourses, Definitions and Delights
3rd Global Conference
Tuesday 14th July 2009 – Thursday 16th July 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
Celluloid Obsessions: Martin Scorsese’s Visual DNA
José Gabriel Ferreras Rodríguez
Universidad de Murcia, Spain
Just like a writer, a painter or a musician has a particular style, which helps define his or her personality as an artist, a filmmaker also has a style that can noticeably distinguish his or her movie to an extent that one can identify its author, independently from the story that is being told. In this sense, one of the movie directors who can be more easily recognized by a simple observation of his visual style is Martin Scorsese. As well as one can often find in his movies such topics as guilt, redemption, paranoia or violence, also a specific, distinguishing audiovisual vocabulary and language can be easily spotted throughout his career: favorite camera moves, editing trademarks, etc., obsessively repeated movie after movie. In visual literacy, form can be compared to grammar and other elements in written language. If in a literary analysis it is possible to consider repetitions, adjectives, syntactic parallelisms, comparisons, hyperboles, rhythmic effects and so on, when it comes to cinema we can equally talk about dissolves, travellings, frozen frames, backward images, fast motion, slow motion, etc. In the present article, our aim will be to analyze some of Scorsese’s most recurring techniques, trying to outline the development towards the visual perfection and refinement that he seems to have embarked in since the early stages of his career and that comes to characterize and personalize his own work as a filmmaker.
The Slight Pencil’s Witchery”: Sigourney’s Ecphrastic Model of Viewership
Christa Holm Vogelius
University of Michigan, USA
W.J.T. Mitchell writes at the end of “Ekphrasis and the Other” that his understanding and analysis of ecphrasis “would look quite different, of course, if my emphasis had been on ekphrastic poetry by women”(181). What Mitchell implies is that female writers have a significantly different approach to the traditional understanding of the image as feminine and the word as masculine, and that this difference influences the way that the paragone, or competition between the arts, works itself out in their poetry. Though male ecphrastic writers, and particularly the British Romantics who dominate critical attention, can often trace the strongest influence on their verse to the classical tradition, ecphrastic poetess verse of the same period—which despite scant critical attention, forms no small canon—was equally influenced by other visual-literary traditions, including emblem poetry and illustrated scholastic texts.
In this paper I examine this alternate ecphrastic tradition through the poems of Lydia Sigourney, the most popular American poetess of her day. I read a number of the poetess’s poems and argue that her model of ecphrasis is one that straddles both the realm of moral instruction with which critics traditionally associate poetess verse, and a more self-conscious system of artistry usually associated with male ecphrastic writers. I argue that in addition to being inspired by the tradition of artistic rivalry which is usually associated with male ecphrastic writers, these poems are deeply influenced by Sigourney’s own experience as a schoolteacher and the popular mid-century educational philosophy of disciplinary intimacy. The poems in effect serve as models for viewing images for their female readers; they both acknowledge the potential moral threat that images presented to Protestant American audiences, and offer a means of viewership that eludes this threat.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
The Comfort of Standing Next to Walls
Esra Plumer
Department of Art History, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
Walls echo the borders that literacy is established upon. The linearity of institutional borders is visible, sequential and thus legible. Pictures are put into frames, visuality is contextualised and subsequently perception is categorized in certain theories of understanding. Questioning borders are thus central to the critical understandings of literacy.
Within the walls of St. Anne’s psychiatric hospital in France, a seated woman continues to knit the same grey sock that she has been knitting for twenty years. In The Man of Jasmine, Unica Zürn records observing this woman unravel the grey sock time and time again. The sock will never be finished.
Unica Zürn, German born writer/artist is a personality who found liberation in being confined in asylums, clinics, and hospitals and considered mental illness a path to creativity. During her artistic career she produced a series of anagram poems, automatic drawings and several prose writings. There is a perpetuation of illness in Zürn’s work, especially prominent in the titles of her books; such as House of Illnesses, The Man of Jasmine, and Dark Spring, all of which refer to periods of observing and experiencing mental illnesses.
Zürn’s automatic drawings are often considered visually illiterate while being subjected to contextual and narrative literacies through autobiographical facts and historical analogues. This paper will look at the contextual and narrative aspects of reading Zürn’s images and writing in order to propose a new kind of visual literacy of her automatic drawings. Thus, we will examine what I consider the institutional reading of Zürn in order to see that her images are not illiterate but rather have an inherent ill-literate quality which cannot be confined to institutional spaces and modes of thought. The continuous line in Zürn’s drawings, like entangled floccus, is constantly unravelled, like the grey sock, creating a space of resistance within the walls of the institution. This mode of production exchanges the linearity of institutional borders and embraces illness while refusing the will of the institution to cure it. What I refer to as ill-literate is a representation of the space of resistance Zürn creates inside the institution.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Screening Subjectivity: A Narrative Analysis of Learning Visual Literacies
Monsterrat Rifa-Valls
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
My aim in this paper is to explore the relationship between learning visual literacies, and the construction of university students’ subjectivities from a narrative perspective. For the last two years, I have been teaching audiovisual communication in a pre-service teacher education course at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. To start with, I will reconstruct how university students relocate themselves when they deconstruct contemporary representations of subjectivity through reading and critically interpreting different film texts they have to discuss. Mainly, I will focus on the analysis of visual modes of telling others about our subjectivities. Therefore, I will narratively reconstruct the process of making a short by different groups (writing the script, acting, capturing and editing) in order to understand how the students visually represent subjectivity, as well as to know how this process is mediating in, or mediated by, their personal, social, cultural, and gender relations. I will present the topics they are interested in as youth people, particularly, when they decide to document their own lives or invent new life stories using different film genres they choose. Moreover, the analysis of scenes reveals that the students usually create movies based on everyday life situations and thrillers. Tthey cooperate and participate with the aim of creating agency. Lastly, I will explore the role of reflexivity, intertextuality and metanarrative in creating a digital media portfolio, as a new place where learning and subjectivity intersect.
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